Breaking Dev: Taxonomy of Touch

At the Breaking Development Conference in Dallas TX, Nate Koechley discussed elements of touch primitives, gestures and semantics in his presentation “Taxonomy of Touch”. Here’s my notes from his talk:

Touch Input

Input can have different modes (mechanical, audio, or visual). It can be discrete vs. continuous. Different input factors have different degrees of freedom.

Touch is direct, discrete & continuous, absolute, and has a high degree of freedom.

The Web Events working group is working to develop touch standards that enable developers to build applications that better fit touch-based devices. They are working on a spec for low-level physical events & high-level representational events.